But he said he is worried that he is being steered too far by the Congress: “Some of the men and women I work with in Congress are socialists.”

Asked to clarify his comments after the breakfast speech at the Trussville Civic Center, Bachus said 17 members of the U.S. House are socialists.

This is an outrage. Why is this man stupid enough to believe that there are only 17? The current trajectory of American economic policy reminds us more and more of Hugo Chavez or perhaps, if the world really does cut loose the USD as a reserve currency, Robert Mugabe.

In Free-Market, Non-Statist economy, elected officials do not fire corporate honchos. They also should not be in the business of lending businesses money or acquiring assets those businessmen can’t effectively market and manage. Corporate bankruptcy laws exist so that TARP should never have to.

The people who run our government understand this. They know well our system has feedback mechanisms that would mitigate our current economic travails given adequate space and time. They don’t want this to happen. This has proven too good a crisis to go to waste.

Critics of the feared Military-Industrial Complex have long referred to The Pentagon as Versailles on The Potomac. They now have a new boogeyman they can dance to. The TARP State has arisen with one bank to rule them all, one bank to find them, one bank to bring them all and in darkness bind them. (Apologies to JRR Tolkien).

This financial land of Mordor has surjected Federal dominion over the economy in a manner never contemplated by even FDR when he contemplated adding six justices to the Supreme Court. Rich Lowry describes the imperial hubris of the TARP State below.

The administration doesn’t only get to decide who gets TARP funds and on what basis, but whether firms can give the money back. In a meeting with bankers at the White House, Obama told those bank CEOs wanting to return federal dollars that they couldn’t yet. The administration is on the verge of extending TARP funds to life-insurance companies, the latest sector of the economy agitating for government largesse.

What demoralizes me even further is the cultural Zeitgeist in which this power grab has taken place. The American people really have forgotten what the world was like when the USSR ran gulags, had Eastern Europe in a strangle-hold and threatened to position nuclear weapons in Cuba. According to Rasmussen, only 53% of the American people still get the difference between Democracy and INGSOC.

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.
Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

This is easy to understand, despite the nausea it induces. Many of the people answering these questions wore diapers or didn’t exist when Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter boycotted the Olympics. With no counterexample available, we just see our government compared to its lofty and nearly unachievable ideals. We don’t hear about the Iron Curtain anymore; thus we’ve forgotten what all of it is like.

Thus, my fears aren’t that Socialism, as it rises unopposed in America today, will fail. My fears are that it will not fail badly enough. In that twilight gloom of a functional fascism, I see no legitimate reason why the United States would remain any more moral under this type of a system than Russia was under the Bolsheviks.

I am no longer in any way an American Exceptionalist. In a world where a US President can get away with telling anyone he is the only thing between them and the pitchforks, I see no reason to believe our people are any better than the idiot mobs in Rome who brayed for their panem et circenses. Like those idiot mobs on the Roman Sportula, they are now capable of pretty much anything.

As GK Chesterton famously intoned. “Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”

We saw what the worshippers at Lenin’s Tomb did for seventy years during the 20th Century. I genuinely fear and regret what our nation could become if we chose a similar path. I’m just not seeing the alternative or the detour in near future. I hope the American people see how evil socialism is before the innocent and undeserving peoples throughout the rest of world discover how despicably evil America would be as a socialist worker’s paradise.